The Disruption of American Democracy

by Roy Franklin Nichols

history

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, Political Science

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1948

Reviews

[O. Gold · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a teacher from 1957 to 1993, when asked by my students
what was my favorite book, I would answer "The Disruption of American Democracy."
A Pulitzer Prize winner, it is so well written and researched that I keep rereading
it after all these years, The book describes in vivid detail the breakup of the
Democratic party in the pre-Civil War years which Nichols sees as a symptom of
the political rancor of the era.

[Palm Desert · Rating 5 out of 5]

A "must" for anyone interested in the events leading to the Civil War.

[Peter Shonka · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very well written book about the election and administration of James Buchanan and the implosion of the democratic party, which was called "the Democracy" at that time. For many years the slavocracy of the south was able to control the federal government through congressional leadership, appointments to the supreme court and southern slaveowners in the white house, or at least northern men sympathetic to the south. As emigrants flooded into the industrializing north, the south started losing representation in the House of Representatives, Power in the Senate was also shifting out of balance as "free" states were organized in the Louisiana Purchase and in the lands ceded by Mexico. The states also became the political battleground that that served to polarize antislavery sentiment in the north. James Buchanan assumed office as these seismic changes were occurring and proved to be entirely inadequate to the task of understanding and dealing with these changes. To complicate his problems the rise of metropolitanism, antislavery sentiment, economic forces caused a shift in the politics of the northern politicians of the Democratic Party. Sympathetic to their Southern brethren, but unable to win election without speaking out against slavery and for homesteading and other issues that the South took exception to, it became increasing difficult to hold the party together. Final act of the break up started with the attempt to choose a candidate for president to represent the party in the election of 1860. Unable to choose a single candidate that satisfied the northern and southern wings resulted in a party split with two candidates, which ensured the election of Abraham Lincoln. Secession of the deep South followed and the Civil War began.